Climate change does not begin with the climate crisis. It emerges from histories of broken worlds.

We are living in a time in which the future often appears as something already determined: ecological collapse, climate catastrophe, political instability, extinction and displacement. These are worlds shaped by histories of colonialism, extraction, violence, displacement and unequal access to land, resources and belonging. How can we imagine a future that is not simply a continuation of the present?

This seminar begins with the idea of broken worlds. Drawing on Kathryn Yusoff's A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, we will question the apparently universal history contained in the concept of the Anthropocene. Climate change is not the beginning of planetary transformation. It is entangled with much longer histories in which particular landscapes, peoples, bodies and forms of life have already been damaged, displaced, extracted or rendered disposable.

Malcom Ferdinand’s A Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World offers another important perspective on this entanglement. Thinking from the Caribbean, Ferdinand brings together histories of colonialism, slavery and racial violence with histories of environmental destruction. Rather than treating ecological crisis and social injustice as separate problems, he describes them as interconnected dimensions of modernity’s “double fracture.” His question is not only how to repair a damaged world, but how to imagine and build a common world beyond these fractures.

Throughout the seminar, we will return to the idea of “undead matter” as a way of thinking about what remains after worlds have been disrupted or destroyed. What appears to be dead or finished may continue to transform, persist and generate new relations. Matter carries histories; it moves across different temporalities and can reformulate its communities. What if the remains of a broken world are not simply remnants of the past, but materials through which other worlds might emerge?

We will move backwards and forwards through radically different scales of time. In Thomas Halliday's Otherlands, we encounter worlds that existed millions of years before us: ecosystems that have disappeared, species that have vanished, landscapes that have been transformed beyond recognition. Halliday reconstructs these extinct worlds from traces in the fossil record, allowing us to imagine places that can no longer be visited.

What does it mean to imagine a world that no longer exists? And could this also teach us something about imagining a world that does not yet exist?

Could artistic practice become a form of rehearsal for futures that do not yet exist? A rehearsal is neither the finished work nor simply an imaginary exercise. It is a space in which something can be tried out, repeated, altered and failed. It allows us to temporarily inhabit possibilities before they become, or perhaps instead of becoming, reality.

Can an exhibition be a rehearsal for another form of society?

Can a public artwork rehearse another form of publicness?

Can an artistic practice rehearse another relationship to land?

Can we rehearse forms of coexistence with non-human life?

Can we rehearse ways of living with what cannot be repaired? Who is art for when there is no longer a public? Could an artwork be addressed to future generations, to displaced communities, to plants, fungi, animals, water, soil or machines? What happens to public art when the public disappears? What happens to land art when the land itself is transformed?

The seminar will combine reading, looking, discussing, presenting and making. We will read theoretical, philosophical, literary and speculative writing; look at historical and contemporary artistic practices; discuss works collectively; and develop our own artistic responses. We will encounter practices that work with ruins, archives, landscapes, extraction, ecological transformation, migration, non-human life and speculative futures.

At the same time, we will pay attention to the emotional and political registers through which artists work in uncertain times: anger, mourning, failure, care, refusal, resistance, hope, imagination, desire and joy. The question is not simply how art can respond to a broken world. What if art is not only a way of imagining the future, but a way of practising it?

The seminar culminates in: REHEARSE A FUTURE

Students develop an artistic situation, performance, spatial intervention, object, text, image, exhibition, ritual or collective action that does not simply represent a possible future, but creates a situation in which that future can be temporarily experienced, tested or imagined.

The final work is understood not as a finished answer, but as a rehearsal: a space for trying out another way of inhabiting, relating, organising, remembering or imagining a world.

Bibliography

Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

Ferdinand, Malcom. A Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022.

Halliday, Thomas. Otherlands: A World in the Making. New York: Random House, 2022.

Rau, Milo. Die Rückeroberung der Zukunft: Ein Essay. Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag, 2023.

Acharya, Amitav. The Once and Future World Order: What Comes After Hegemony? New York: Basic Books, 2025.